Largely set in the mid-1990s at an Ivy League college, Sarah Henstra’s provocative new novel—her first for adult readers—explores contrasting forms of Greek life. A notorious fraternity widely blamed for contributing to campus rape culture is juxtaposed with an exploration of classical mythology and gender through a fabled feminist course taught by Sylvia Esterhazy, whose acolytes respond to her both intellectually and erotically.

When The Red Word opens, Karen Huls, a commercial photographer with a private artistic interest in capturing images of decay, is at home in Toronto. A call from an old acquaintance notifies her of the sudden death of a college housemate, whose memorial service will take place in the same city where Karen is slated to attend a conference: “The coincidence seems important in a spooky, literary way, like tragic destiny.” The slightly awkward device of having her trip to the U.S. and her friend’s death resurrect her own memories is more than atoned for in the adroit execution of this brainy, often discomfiting novel of sexual politics and passionate friendship.

Much of the novel details the narrator’s crucial second year of university. Karen holds two part-time jobs, including one as an art class model, to supplement her scholarship; she is at a remove from the careless wealth of many of her classmates. She is thrilled when a group of women agree to let her join their explicitly feminist household, a hothouse of intellectual fervor and political commitments. Steph, a graduate student and teaching assistant, is brilliant, articulate, and painfully sensitive. Dyann is the natural leader, the most militant in her application of the precept that the personal is the political, while Marie-Jeanne, once an anorexic dancer, is more pragmatic. And there is Charla, who is perhaps most like Karen in her desire to explore the bounds of physical as well as academic experience.

Karen herself is at once an astute observer of the campus climate and naïve in believing that she can sustain a neutral stance, spending nights with her boyfriend at his fraternity but also engaging with her housemates’ political and spiritual feminist leanings. Henstra’s layered, allusive work positions Karen as a kind of moral centre, who resists her housemates’ more dogmatic leanings. But her status is uneasy, with Karen becoming implicated in acts of violence she did not anticipate. Late in the novel, one of her housemates suggests that Karen is a kind of Helen of Troy fought over by opposing forces: symbol, object of desire, enigma.

Karen first turns up to the house the young women affectionately name Raghurst disheveled and still inebriated, after a late night sexual encounter. Her potential housemates ask if she was assaulted and offer to take her to hospital, and Karen is quick to insist that she consented. But Mike, the accomplished science student who becomes her boyfriend, points out months later that he knew that she was drunk and proceeded anyway. This is one of many of the novel’s efforts to understand the boundaries of sexual agency and responsibility toward others, and the questions Henstra poses trouble easy dichotimes: Can women consent to anything, even sexual activity that appears to humiliate and objectify them? Should men who are unwittingly under the influence of drugs be held accountable for their actions? What is the relationship between male bonding and aggression and the competition over women? How is men’s sexual banter related to sexual violence? How are apparently innocuous acts connected to a broader pattern of harm and exploitation?

The feminist, lesbian-friendly household that Karen moves in to is a kind of idealized sorority, offering feminist solidarity that she initially relishes. Passages of the women’s heady academic dialogues are provided, as in an example Henstra titles “The women of Raghust hold forth amongst themselves on the subject of the erotics of learning,” when Charla comments on Professor Esterhazy’s sexually aroused students:

Steph: It undermines the impact of feminist criticism to say that it’s hot.

Charla: Talking about sex is a sex act.

Steph: Not when you’re trying to disinvest those discourses from their patriarchal underpinnings.

Charla: The word “disinvest” is hot. The word “underpinnings” is hot.

But their intimacy also proves precarious: Karen’s housemates are so determined to expose a longstanding pattern of misconduct that they take drastic action to discredit the fraternity brothers. Karen’s loyalties are divided, not only because of her relationship with Mike but also by her poorly-concealed attraction to another fraternity member, whose selfish and boorish behaviour toward women has made him a key figure in a women's centre "Shame" display. Henstra writes frankly about sexuality, offering some of the most direct representations I can recall of a young woman’s sexually unsatisfying relationship with a not particularly sensitive male partner. Karen’s sometimes deeply politically incorrect fantasies—and her own dexterity—offer her more satisfaction.

Events move quickly, and relationships deepen and then unravel. A devastating betrayal leads to Karen’s own experience of exploitation, which then precipitates further harm.

And there is Henstra’s exquisite attention to style, her careful mimicry of classical epithets and phraseology. This is a book to savour, even while the plot careens along. Each chapter is named for a classical device, theatrical or rhetorical, ranging from the more familiar (apotheosis, elegeia) to the more obscure (eustathia, “promising constancy in purpose and affection”). These are the counterpart to the Greek and Latin words that Professor Esterhazy promises her avid students will be sprinkled only judiciously, as necessary, through their year-long study of women and myth.

And then there is Professor Esterhazy: at once beguiling and withholding, refusing to engage in student politics, wary of siding with the vulnerable after her own bruising battle to gain tenure. Karen does not fall as hard as Steph, or suffer consequences as scalding, but she does experience disillusionment when she sees Esterhazy, whom she’d imagined as resolutely solitary, in the domestic comfort of a dinner party with her husband and friends. When Karen seeks out her professor’s guidance and support, Esterhazy demurs, refusing to connect the content she teaches to the younger women’s contemporary struggles, even telling Karen, “Class is so much more of a barrier to equality than gender, you know,” and encouraging Karen to run for student council rather than participate in campus activism, because it's something she can put on her c.v..

This is a disquieting depiction of how academic feminism divorces itself from politics, how tenured women step away from the messiness of contemporary debates about sexualized violence or racism (and some, to their credit, do not, but it’s been dismaying to see the broad consequences of institutionalizing feminism). Henstra’s novel, though largely set 20 years ago, points to the ongoing, recurring nature of addressing sexual and other inequities on campus. She illuminates how ideological commitments can fuel self-righteous zealotry, but she does not single out feminism as the problem, or merely reverse blame. Instead, she offers a careful, nuanced portrayal in this original and compelling work.

[With thanks to Netgalley for the electronic ARC. And I should note that I went to grad school with Sarah Henstra, who was an always-invigorating conversationalist.]